14 Battle

Hawks circled in the clear blue searching for prey below in glades and grasslands. Gliding aloft, wind whistling through feathers spread wide like fingers to catch the rising drafts of heat and air, heads swiveling, eyes darting, it was up not down that they should have been studying. Startled, they shrieked their displeasure as Poe parted their ranks, breaking their aerial ballet as he descended limned in argent and gold.

This quickening to glory and power had been neither quick nor easy. He had put a half a day’s distance between himself and the way station when the Magister had begun channeling power to him in slow, steady increments. It had taken another day of careful concentration, cramps that made him squat beside the road as the muscles in his legs bunched, and flesh that became so sensitive that even light made it feel as if it burned. And then there were the other, unforeseen side effects.

For all their precautions, the emotions flowing and congealing from all the minds connected through the Unity could not be filtered out. Doubt, fear, loss, he felt them all. The pendulum of emotions swung his mood so that he could go from wanting to cry at some inconsequential puff of memory to gritting his teeth against a rage that was not his own. While he dealt with the distracting touch of others’ minds and feelings washing over his soul, he also had to be very careful that as the power filled him he did not take in too much too fast lest he burn himself out.

Regulating the forces flowing into him, his senses became sharper and his abilities stretched beyond limits he once thought impossible, but it was only toward the end of the process when the most sweeping and visible changes took effect.

It was then his ki had flowered into something unbelievable, visible as an argent and gold corona surrounding his body in an incandescent ripple of flame. His eyes became blazing orbs of light, the manifestation of over twenty-five minds linked in an intricate balance of power. He was a god born to earth to battle ignorance and darkness. He was light given flesh. He was invincible. Or so he felt. So he believed. So he hoped.

            When he settled to the ground, he reigned in the luminescent aura surrounding him, dampening it until the corona that wrapped him about frayed and dissipated. Though masked as best he could from detection, the overflow of ki was still barely perceptible like ambient heat rising from hard baked earth.

Poe pulled his cloak tight and blinked as if seeing the world anew for the first time. He knew this spot, if not from sight, from description. He stood where Malcolm’s family farm had once been. There was the old paddock, fences and posts rotted and falling over. The remnants of a house’s stone foundation grown through with roots from the sapling spreading shoots to the sky, the facade of one wall, and the chimney collapsing in upon the stone hearth.

            Poe’s breath stuttered, and his heart skipped a beat. Pain, devastation, despair, the revenants of Malcolm’s emotions flowed through the link. Powerfully, subtly, and, unknowingly, those emotions had directed Poe to this spot. Troubling to realize how, so unwittingly, he had been directed to this here.

            But he had no time for such things as he stepped beneath the canopy of trees and set a quick pace through the forest. He spread his senses to encompass the heat in the rays of sunlight light slanting through the trees, the moisture in the soil, the family of woodpeckers in the high hollow of a tree, the squirrels flitting in the treetops. Still, he could detect no sign of the boy.

            Soon he was at the clearing. The cottage was gone. Nothing remained except a barren, yellowed square slowly being overrun by creeping vine and lichen. And there was the rift, potent, vibrating at a pitch that caused an uncomfortable tingling in Poe’s fingers and toes. It was like a festering sore leaking puss at the edges, growing and spreading as those midnight heavens sucked light and heat and ki into the maw. And there was nothing he could do to stop it.

            He began to prepare the area, and when he was finished, he severed the boy’s own crude wards and waited, hidden behind an illusion of wind and wood.

While he waited, his attention returned to the gaping, dark fissure. Curiosity warred with caution and caution lost. He sent a tentative, exploratory thought into the heart of the fissure. This time he was able to resist the overwhelming force that tried to drag his consciousness from his body. Within that storm of roiling ki, almost obscured by the energies streaming into it, Poe recognized the same malevolent specter of dark fire that had erupted from the broken seal, but within the rift it was bound, its perception tempered. The energies streaming into the rift kept it somnolent, satiated. But it began to rouse as it sensed the strange consciousness in the void with it. Fighting against whatever tether bound it, it seemed to scent the void like a hound scenting the air and when it found Poe, he sensed something huge beyond scope, with a hunger beyond his ability to grasp or understand. Poe considered it prudent that he retreat.

So it was back to waiting until he felt something brushing at the edges of his wards. He probed the area but could detect nothing out of the ordinary, no ki or physical presence, but he delved deeper, remembering what Ham had told him, and there it was: loneliness, anger, doom. It seeped into root and leaf and bough and branch, spreading and contaminating the area like an infection. Poe could not exactly locate the boy, but Poe knew that he had arrived.

Poe concentrated on the place where he had first felt his wards being touched. The assault would come from there. Poe was not strong in ephemera but others were, and he drew that knowledge from the Unity. It was simple really, like suddenly being able to see other shades and bands of color and there it was, curiosity, wariness, but still he could not exactly place the boy. The emotions were too dispersed and unfocused.

Poe began gathering ki from the resonant emotions that charged the area. He drew those energies to him like a flue drawing the smoke of a fire. Love, loss, pain, rage, fear, despair and hope, trace memories that lingered like the heat of the sun. Now that he could discern with greater clarity the uses of ephemera, it was so simple.

Poe crafted a fascination, an invisible lattice flowing and stretching above them like the web of a spider. and then he released his illusion. The air hissed, thickened and sparkled. It lasted for but an instance. What caused it to stop was the lattice contracting around the boy. The boy’s own power triggered the net, and his struggles gave it strength. The net would grow smaller and smaller as the boy pushed against the fascination with muscle and mind, the whole of his will, until he became exhausted. No longer able to fight, he would be trussed up like a netted fish.

Wrested from invisibility, the boy’s face was a contorted mask as his own innermost dreads and desires were turned against him. Poe began moving across the clearing toward the boy to collect his errant prize, but he stopped halfway across.

The boy’s demeanor calmed and the weave of ephemera and ki that made up the fascination stopped shrinking. Instead of fighting against it, the boy accepted, opened himself to the onslaught, inverting the lattice so that it cascaded upon him and unfurled like some strange and exotic flower giving seed. He released the bloom in a wail that shook the earth. Poe met that shock of sound with a slap of thought that shook the boy from his feet.

            Poe gathered light from the sun, heat from the earth, and his own argent ki into his cupped hands. The ball of swirling, gaseous thought grew to the size of a pumpkin. When he could hold no more, he released it as a blinding lance meant not to kill, but to overwhelm.

It splashed against the boy’s protective barriers. Fractures of argent spread across the surface of the boy’s wards. Poe sent another lance of argent white. It caused the fissures to widen, reaching deep into the shield like cracks in thick ice, but still the boy’s barrier held. The wellspring from which the boy drew could not be limitless, unless he had found some way to directly touch the Source.

Poe’s thoughts turned to the rift, fearful suspicions stirring. That moment of distraction was all the boy needed. He unleashed a mental shout that wrenched thought and mind from the moorings of consciousness.  Poe’s mind frayed, his wards faltered and earth, leaves, branches and the crawling things that lived in the dark gripped his feet and began flowing up his leg like sludge. It dampened his link to the Unity and dimmed the golden light that suffused him. Poe tried to rise from its binding clasp. It elongated but would not break, would not relinquish its prize. The power flowing from the Unity was being annulled by cloying earth charged with the boy’s ki.  

Poe arrested its advance by drawing the moisture from the earth, making it dry and brittle. The moisture he drew from the soil, he sent to wash upon the boy’s shield. Water would find its way. And it did. It coursed through the fissures made by Poe’s attack to the void within. Once within, the globe of water encircled the boy’s head, filling his nostrils and his mouth. With the boy’s concentration broken, Poe was able to smash his fists against the earth which fell away in hard, brittle sheets.

            Poe spread a web of thought cascading in a widening arc. He probed the ether, the strictures of earth and air, of light and matter trying to discern what the boy would use next. There, he had found it—the subtle tugs on the fabric of matter. Poe sent a counter flow to disrupt the connections, causing the lattice to shudder and slip apart. The earth exploded in front of him, showering upon his protective barrier. The surge from the backlash staggered the boy and Poe sent his consciousness toward the boy trying to overwhelm him and subdue the force of his will, but was blocked. He would not succumb to the same trick twice.

Using wind he wrapped the boy up in a whirling gale that lifted him from his feet twirling and twisting to pin him against the gnarled, scarred trunk of an ancient dark oak. He called bark and sapwood from the heart of the tree to enfold the boy, to trap him and draw ki from him like poison being drawn from a wound.    

Ephemera and adamant protested. They were doing horrible damage to the fabric of existence. He needed to end this quickly. While the boy’s might seemed inexhaustible, his was not. He was weakening from the tension of manipulating such vast forces. Fatigue was settling into bone and sinew, his strength was flagging and concentration slipping. The euphoria of the power had dimmed and his connection with the concordance of minds was becoming tenuous.

As the boy struggled to counter Poe’s ward, his ki began to manifest. It flickered and pulsed with a blue radiance marbled with black veins that streamed from his ki to intertwine into one thick umbilicus that disappeared into the rift. Corruption and malevolence emanated from that dark cord.

There lay the source of the boy’s might! As Poe had suspected, he was drawing power through that dark link, and Poe, somehow, had to sever that connection without directly touching it so as not to be tainted by the corrupting contagion he sensed there.

A concussive blast of raw force detonated around him. Bark and sapwood flew by. When the dust and debris settled, Poe floated over a blackened crater. The boy settled on the rim of the crater across from him and warped the ether into a shrill, taught wail of sound that would have shredded flesh from bone if allowed to directly touch upon him.

Pressing against the contracting wall of sound, Poe floated steadily toward the boy. His path forward was inexorable. His shield shrunk until it was a thin flickering nimbus where jets of ki erupted from its surface like argent flame. He passed through the  The pressure increased. Even through his wards, the corona surrounding him flickered as wisps of argent flame erupted in jets the closer he got to the boy. Closer and closer he came until their kis were like two wildly thrashing beasts whose treads darkened the earth and scorched the air. Shields were as nothing as the kis met in a swirl of overlapping energies creating a bubble within which everything was silent as the world outside stormed and raged. Poe’s argent corona ignited in a wild coruscate and shot across the distance to envelop the boy. Liquid silver merged with blue and began squeezing out the black contagion. The boy could not move, and once Poe was close enough so that their breaths could have mingled if they were of the same height, he ensnared them both in earth that surged up past calf and waist, past chest and throat to the knap of scalp to sever the boy’s link to the tainted umbilicus.

Enshrined in a chrysalis of earth shoot though with fissures of dark argent, they were being annealed within that glowing stele of earth and wood. Poe felt the boy weakening, tiring mentally and physically, though you would not have known it by the boy’s expression. He gave no sign of the turmoil and passion that must have been raging inside of him even as the sinews of his arms and body stood out in stark relief against tensed muscles. Even as his body still fought, his mind relented.

Poe breeched the boy’s mental defenses and plummeted to the source of the boy’s powers. He would have to order this chaotic, white band that glowed with the light of the sun and set seals to limit what the boy could draw from that seat of power. And to strengthen the seals, he would use the boy’s own powers to forge the foundations of his own undoing.

Expanding his consciousness to the limits of the boy’s awareness of himself—to that pinprick of obsidian darkness he had encountered once before. Once there, Poe began to strip away the links connecting consciousness to power. He began to seal those areas of power from the boy’s consciousness. It was hard, arduous work fraught with peril and difficult enough to set seals on a willing mind let alone one that was resisting. If the strain exceeded the boy’s resilience, his consciousness could shatter and madness would be the reward for them both.

While Poe shaped the wards and set seals to limit the boy’s power, there was a brief span of instance when the two consciousness became one, when Poe touched possibilities of power undreamed, hidden even from the boy. But those possibilities faded and the memory dwindled as Poe placed the last, final seal.

The cocoon shuddered and rays of argent light broke through seams in the hard packed earth surrounding them.  The seams widened and the earth crumbled to dust leaving a crater of earth in which Poe could barely stand. The link that connected him to the Magister weakened becoming tenuous and transparent. His golden ki shrunk, flickered as if it were a flame and the oxygen that fed it consumed. He let the link dissolve so he could turn all his concentration and energy to the task of ministering the unconscious boy he held cradled in his arms. He had no time to think of the gravity of the circumstance that had overtaken him. That was too weighty a concern, to far reaching. Exhaustion and consideration were the limits of his concerns. He moved form the circle of earth, and laid the boy on the ground. Taking off his cloak from his shoulders, he loosely wrapped the boy in it giving him what comfort he could.

Now to the task of living, Poe thought and began preparing camp for the night.